The Modulation of Personality on Chinese Emotion Word Processing with Different Lexical Categories: An ERP Study

• Main Authors: Li-Chuan Ku, 古李全
• Other Authors: Shiao-hui Chan
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2014
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/qas656

碩士 === 國立臺灣師範大學 === 英語學系 === 102 === Emotion connotations embedded in words have been found to impact word processing. Past studies have also showed that words in different lexical categories would modulate and interact with emotion effects. However, personality traits, one of the variables demonstrating individual differences in emotion word processing in healthy populations, have seldom been taken into account. This study aimed to explore whether personality traits, extraversion and neuroticism in particular, influenced the processing of Chinese emotion words in a lexical decision task by manipulating both emotional (valence: positive, neutral, negative) and linguistic (lexical category: stative verbs, eventive verbs, nouns) features of Chinese two-word compounds with the event-related potential technique. The results showed that the emotion effects appeared in P2, N400, and LPC, and that the modulations of participants’ neuroticism level on emotion effects were observed in N400 and LPC, after the emotion meanings of words with different semantic complexity were already recognized. In contrast to Eysenck’s model of personality, there was no evidence of connections between extraversion and the processing of emotion valence. Furthermore, the lack of a lexical category effect in the early time window and the same onsets of emotion effects on words across different lexical categories might reflect similar processing of the emotion contents in these categories due to the shared underlying distributional structures in Chinese speakers’ conceptual system.